Sindee Lou Simon is an American chemical engineer and polymer physicist who studies the glass transition, thermosetting polymers, and nanoconfinement.[1][2] Her research has included studies of ancient amber, showing that unlike liquids glass does not flow.[3] She is the head of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at North Carolina State University.[2]
Simon grew up in Wichita, Kansas, the daughter of a schoolteacher and a technical salesman for the aircraft industry; she was directed towards chemical engineering by a high school mathematics teacher. She became an undergraduate at Yale University, where she competed in the Yale swimming team, serving as captain of the team for two years,[1] and was named an All-American for 1982 by the College Swimming Coaches Association of America for the backstroke in NCAA Division I.[4]
After graduating, she worked for four years at the Beech Aircraft Corporation, on the materials science behind their first composite aircraft.[1] She went to Princeton University for graduate study, completing her Ph.D. in 1992.[5]
She joined the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh as an assistant professor of chemical and petroleum engineering in 1992,[5] before moving to Texas Tech University in 1999. The move solved a two-body problem for her and her husband, chemical engineer Gregory B. McKenna, who moved from the National Institute of Standards and Technology to Texas Tech at the same time.[1] At Texas Tech, she was department chair for chemical engineering from 2012 to 2019.[5] She moved again, to North Carolina State University, in 2021.[2]
Simon was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 2010, after a nomination from the APS Division of Polymer Physics, "for pioneering contributions to the understanding of the thermal and mechanical properties of bulk and nanostructured polymeric glasses".[6] She also became a fellow of the North American Thermal Analysis Society in 2003, of the Society of Plastics Engineers in 2005, and of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers in 2015.[5]
She was named P. W. Horn Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering at Texas Tech in 2010.[7]
She was the 2014 winner of the Mettler Toledo Outstanding Achievement of the North American Thermal Analysis Society,[5] and the 2019 winner of the International Award of the Society of Plastics Engineers, the first woman to win the society's highest award.[8]